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SOA: Case Study Halifax Bank of Scotland IF.com

SOA: Case Study Halifax Bank of Scotland IF.com. Chapter 17. Background. Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBoS) is a UK financila services provider with divisions in Retail banking, insurance and investment, business banking, corporate banking and treasury.

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SOA: Case Study Halifax Bank of Scotland IF.com

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  1. SOA: Case StudyHalifax Bank of ScotlandIF.com Chapter 17

  2. Background • Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBoS) is a UK financila services provider with divisions in Retail banking, insurance and investment, business banking, corporate banking and treasury. • It is UK’s largest mortgage and savings provider with a customer base of 22 million. • HBoS was formed with through the merger of Halifax and Bank of Scotland • IF (Intelligent Finance) was launched with aim of attracting customers outside Halifax esp. in UK. • It was launched as Project Greenfield in 2000 and became a successful http://www.IF.com in 2003 • In 2004 IF announced that the project had broken even and has become a huge success.

  3. Business principles • In order to prevail in a competitive market a unique product has to be devised, enabling customers to link to a range of personal banking products– mortgages, credit cards, personal loans, savings, and current accounts… • With interest charged only on the difference between their debit and credit balances. • In order to be cost effective, only direct channel will be used, no expensive branch offices. • Market survey indicated that the direct channel would be combination of web access and telephone.

  4. Core business components • At the core of IF.com is a generic banking engine which offers access to products and services for different customer access channels. • It was a very large project under heavy time pressure for delivery: it was decided to take a full blown SOA approach for its transactional aspects. • It was developed initially as xml/idl later transformed into wsdl. • The banking engine provides a suite a XML, web services, processing over 1000000 transactions a day.

  5. Business Impact customers Modern Access channels Extreme Time pressure competition Innovative Banking Products: offsetting Greenfield bank

  6. Business outcome: timeline Oct.1999 J. Spowart Joins halifax Greenfiled co. Savings and current Balances increase by 50% Customers doubled 600000 2004 2001 2002 2003 2000 IF announces Increase in Balances and mortgage Increase to 9% IF.com launch Customer base Increases to 820000 Assets also double

  7. Web channel Call center Email channel Document Mgt. Backoff Workflow Mgt. Customer accounts IF’s Service Architecture Enterprise Layer Process + intermediary service layer Fullfil ment Service request Open account IF.com onePlan Engine Basic layer Feeds to general ledger Links to Banks SWIFT,etc Credit scoring

  8. Details of SOA (p.364): Banking engine • Banking engine: a mixture between process centric service and intermediary service • For example banking engine provides access to different customer accounts that reside on different sub-systems: does not add much to business functionality Intermediary service • Other parts of the banking engine provides service request features: “replace lost credit card” • Service request feature uses the underlying workflow engine • Banking engine provides the interface between the workflow engine and the user access channels through a set of process-oriented service interfaces. • Approximately 250 different service requests are implemented this way • Another set of banking engine interfaces is dedicated to the offsetting functionality of the bank.

  9. Banking engine (contd.) • Offsetting: it is also a combination of intermediary and process-oriented services • One the one hand, it provides the necessary functionality that is required for customers to control the balances on their individual accounts. • On the other hand, it also acts as intermediary for complex calculations in the basic services, that take place, for example, if mortgage and credit-card interest is being set off against interest on savings.

  10. Centralized banking engine • Centralized banking engine to allow all user channels to share common functionality and to provide consistent view. • This design allow for efficient integration among different access technologies. • Disadvantages: lack of modularity, development and maintenance of services difficult; team is currently addressing this issue.

  11. Key Implementation Details • XML services: because of the extremely tight schedule and high integration requirements, existing EAI and blueprints would not be suitable. • SOA, XML, SOAP and WDSL were used even though not many details were available at that time.

  12. …Implementation details • Service repository: IF uses the CCC Harvest source control system as central repository for all service definitions used by the project. • All services are defined as XML Schema definitions and WSDL definitions. • Repository managed by XML Tsar. • Content of the service repository is used by IF.com build manager to generate type-safe APIs and stubs for a variety of programming languages including VB, C++ and Java • These stubs allow developers to client-side and server-side programs/services to access them in a transparent way.

  13. IF.com Service Repository XML schema Definitions + WSDL definitions Service repository Business Analyst XML Tsar (technical Architect) WSDL compiler Build manager Java stubs VB stubs C++ stubs Build repository

  14. Project Management • Design in Action plan (DIA) provided a delivery program, including mobilization plans, training plans, and an outline of required infrastructure. • Work streams and IT steering committee: 23 work streams including banking engine, service design, DB design , workflow, mainframe integration etc. • Architecture board: six senior architects to oversee the overall design. • XML Tsar and Tsardom: to design, develop, deploy and manage XML related service interfaces, repository, and specifications.

  15. Technology • We now look at the actual technology used in realization of the implementation discussed. • Technical architecture, XML service definitions and technical infrastructure.

  16. Technical Architecture (TA) • TA of IF.com required integration of wide range of technologies • Banking engine is implemented in Java and BEA WebLogic • Web channel is based entirely on Microsoft technologies: since existing system had security approval for this system for MS products. • Call center and IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) is based on Genesys CTI suite using customized C/C++ on Unix. • Backend consisted of a variety of mainframe, unix and NT systems.

  17. ASP/IIS/MTS server CTI server Web Channel Call center IVR WSDL VB/COM Stubs WSDL C++ Stubs Technical Architecture of IF.com SOAP(XML/HTTP) WSDL Java Skeletons EJB Application server IF.com One plan session beans RDBMS JDBC XML switch Client APIs XML parser CORBA etc. XML/IIOP XML MQ series XML Switch OS/390 mainframe Other Backend systems Other Backend systems

  18. TA: Service repository, service interfaces, and contracts • All services are hardwired through configuration files. That is, there is no explicit service registry. • Basic services: are implemented using different technologies ranging from CORBA, DCOM , XML and MQ series. • Banking engine: IF.COM engine is based on about 1300 schema definitions, 120 WSDL WS interfaces, 600 WS operations, 1,000,000 XML SOAP transactions a day. (one of biggest and most successful)

  19. Technical Architecture (contd.) • Banking engine services is divided into a number of namespaces including Common, ContcatCentre, Workflow, OpenAccount, PersonalAdvisors, QuickQuote, and ServiceRequest. • OpenAccount namespace in turn includes service interfaces such as AddressMgr, ApplicationMgr, BroadRequest, OfferEngine, CreditCardApplication, CurrAccounApplication, etc. • Banking engine runs on J2EE application server and session beans to implement service interfaces. • IF has realized the importance of dividing the complex monolithic banking engine into smaller service units and is attempting this in the next version.

  20. Lessons Learned, Benefits and Perspectives • SOA requires not only sound technical design but also a project management initiative that supports technical architecture on the project level. • XML Tsar as key project management tool for coordinating the development of a large set of technical interfaces. • Banking engine was initially developed as a tightly coupled system to be evolved into a loosely couples service-oriented system. • 90% of services were developed in first 9months. • Later phases involved maintenance, third-party integration and increasing system agility. • SOA provided IF.com one of the most advanced IT architectures in the banking world.

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